Arrival of woodpeckers is a welcome event

Published 12:00 am, Monday, January 31, 2011

This red-bellied woodpecker on the Mims place was photographed while taking a brief break. Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III.

This red-bellied woodpecker on the Mims place was photographed while taking a brief break. Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III.

Photo: FORREST M MIMS 111

Arrival of woodpeckers is a welcome event

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Winter is the best time to watch woodpeckers at work. Since most trees have shed their leaves, woodpeckers are easy to see as they hunt, peck and drill along tree trunks and large branches.

At least three species of woodpeckers live on or visit our place on Geronimo Creek near Seguin. They include the yellow-bellied sapsucker, the red-bellied sapsucker and the ladder-backed woodpecker.

The yellow-bellied sapsucker has a bright red cap and throat. It drills small holes in tree trunks and branches and returns later to eat sap and any insects it attracts.

The red-bellied sapsucker sports a red cap and chin, not a red belly. It enjoys announcing its presence with loud squawks while searching for a good place to drill its next hole.

The male ladder-backed woodpecker has a red cap with distinctive black and white markings on its head.

Woodpeckers can be identified in flight by their distinctive up and down arcs that form a wave across the sky.

Woodpecker feet have toes with long, sharp claws. In most species, two of the toes face forward and two backward. This, in addition to their short, stiff tail feathers, allows woodpeckers to march up and around tree trunks with ease and to stay anchored firmly in place while banging their beaks into bark and wood.

Related Stories

Woodpeckers attract the most attention when using their beaks as a hammer, especially when attempting to drill into steel fixtures atop utility poles. Less obvious is that they also use their beaks to poke and pry. Some have very long tongues to help capture their prey.

The ability of woodpeckers to drill holes into solid wood without harming their eyes and causing damaging brain concussions has attracted the interest of physicians concerned about brain damage in humans.

In the 1970s, Drs. Philip May, Joaquin Fuster and others at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine made high-speed motion pictures of woodpeckers at work to better understand how they survive hammering their heads against wood thousands of times a day. Writing in the medical journal The Lancet, they described the woodpecker as "an experiment in nature, a model for the investigation of mechanisms of basic importance for head injury and its prevention."

Most Popular

I've been unable to determine if new ways to protect the human brain have emerged from woodpecker research. Meanwhile, the woodpeckers at our place continue doing what they do so well. One has just completed excavating a cavity in the dead branch of a cedar elm tree next to my office. The wood chips from this project are scattered across the ground and the hood of my pickup.